Brief Published (Dubai time, UTC+4)
Rob Franklin, an award-winning author, has published his acclaimed debut novel, Great Black Hope, which explores themes of race, social class, respectability politics, and the sense of belonging.
The novel follows David Smith, a young Black man from an upper-middle-class family in the southern United States. Despite his education, manners, and connections that open doors for him, he lives in constant fear of exclusion due to his identity.
Franklin analyzes how this tension drives individuals to adopt an acceptable version of themselves, a form of performance that incurs a significant psychological cost, described by the author as a “cancer that eats them from the inside.”
